by Héctor Tobar
I always expected him to do this.
Maybe from the first time they dated she sensed that the nervous, faded-cotton exterior of Scott Torres concealed a roiling core. That was the attraction to him in the first place, wasn’t it? Before she had seen the home in South Whittier, before she had lived with the man, she saw the anguished exertions of an artist searching for perfection, though he possessed only some of the language and social gifts that oozed from painters, actors, and writers. He suffered to bring his creations into the world, and when they did not come he could turn sullen and angry in a disturbingly adolescent kind of way. His daydreams and his projects were his best friends and companions, and often they caused his face to brighten with a mischievous sparkle. There was something charming, she decided, about a man whose brilliance lay in solving problems that could not be easily explained in words. I will make you my project, Scott Torres. She had taken this shy man and, like a wizardess, had given him at least some charm, and a surplus of family riches. And now he had rewarded her with the same common violence that sent women to shelters. Hours later she could still feel his assault just below her collarbone, and see the two bruises that seemed to float on the surface of her skin like jellyfish.
Fatherhood did this to men. They weren’t prepared for it. After the boys were born there were days when Scott glared at the clutter of baby paraphernalia in their home, the spit-up stains scattered on the rugs and their clothing, with the resentful eyes of a prison convict. What? Did you expect it to be easy? This sagging you feel around your eyes, the ache in your arms, that is called parenthood, and it is no longer the exclusive province of women. Then came the scattered moments of aggression when his toddlers committed minor sins, when Brandon was a two-year-old just learning the power of felt-tip pens to deface freshly painted walls, or when Keenan tossed a wine glass on the floor, and Scott blared a too-loud “No!” When she was halfway into carrying Samantha, he punched the wall, leaving a crater for a week before fixing it, never bothering to explain what had set him off. It’s true what my mother said. You can think you know someone as intimately as they can be known, you can commune happily with their odors and their idiosyncrasies for years, but then they show you something distasteful, something frightening precisely at the moment when you’re too far in to get out. Maureen’s father was old Missouri Irish and the hurtful memory of his living room explosions had led her to adopt her mother’s maiden name when she was eight een. Now the neighbors had likely heard Scott too, they knew that his wife and children were inside cowering. They all knew.
Maureen felt the curtains of an ancient, unerasable shame being drawn across the windows of this bright home. I have to flee. Again. When she was eleven Maureen walked out and no one heard the slap of the screen door because her older sister and her mother were in full-throated battle with her father. On that day she ran out in her spring sundress and sandals, jumping down the steps, running to the corner, and then walking when she looked over her shoulder and saw no one was following, past other small houses like hers in that Missouri river town, underneath the impossible pinks of the flowering dogwoods, past the lonely Baptist church and the venerable, abandoned gas station and its gravel bays. Past the fields at the edge of town, with pebbles in her sandals, she walked slowly toward the unfettered horizon that loomed over the stubs of early corn, feeling comfort in the promise of other fields fallow and freshly plowed, and then to the hills where tractors cut plow lines that flowed around the undulating contours of the landscape, until she finally stood alone at the entrance to a solitary farm. Two silos stood guard there, each looking like a man with steel-pipe arms and a tin-roof hat, and she thought how much better it would be to have a father who was as tall and stately and silent. She thought these things until tires rolled on the dirt path behind her, and she turned and saw the police car that would take her home.
Now Maureen would leave and stay gone for a few days, and her absence would teach Scott a lesson. She would leave and decide later whether, and under what conditions, she would come back. But how would she cope on the road with three children, driving on the interstate?
How long could she even control her boys in a claustrophobic hotel room? She envisioned herself with her three children at a nearby hotel suite, the boys pushing each other backward into the fold-out couch, the minibar, in subconscious imitation of their father. Did she really want to be around that boy energy, their unpredictable physicality? A woman alone with two boys and a baby girl would not work. Her mother was in St. Louis, and if Scott was right about the credit cards Maureen wouldn’t be able to buy plane tickets to get there. Maureen went over her options during a mostly sleepless night and in the last hour before dawn she knew exactly what she would do: she would raid the emergency cash that the ever-cautious Scott kept in a washroom drawer next to the earthquake kit. And then she would leave with Samantha for a few days, allowing Scott to contemplate her absence and take care of the boys. Araceli would be there to keep the household from falling apart and the boys from going hungry. It was what she had always wanted to do anyway, to take off with Samantha for a few days, for a “girls’ vacation.”
As she carried a half-asleep Samantha through the house and to the car, she thought, It’s going to be another hot day. For the moment, however, there would be the chill of early morning, and she tossed a blanket over her daughter. She wanted to be out the door before Scott woke up, to avoid any further, unpleasant confrontations and present him with a fait accompli, but when she entered the garage at 7:45 a.m. she discovered his car was already gone; he was off to work about an hour earlier than usual. This did not surprise her, though it did cause her to pause in her escape plan: if she left now, her two boys would be alone in the house, because Araceli was still in the guesthouse, and not yet at work, separated from Brandon and Keenan by two walls and the five paces or so it took to walk to the kitchen’s back door. Damn it! To leave now would violate a taboo of motherhood: she would have to carry Samantha back into the house and start her escape all over again. If I go back in, I might not leave at all, I might lose my nerve. She opened the garage door to confirm his car was also absent from the driveway, then stepped outside into the morning air. Now the light came on in the kitchen, and from the driveway Maureen could see, through the window, the sleepy rebellion on the face of her Mexican employee as she began the breakfast routine. Araceli was in the house, and the sight of her was enough to set Maureen on her journey again, to surrender to the momentum and sense of emancipatory purpose that had brought her to the driveway in the first place. She opened the car door and gave a faint sigh as she freed herself of her sleeping daughter’s weight and strapped her into the car seat. She had a vague idea of where she was headed: to that spa in the high desert mountains above Joshua Tree she had read about in the arts section of the newspaper, the one said to be relatively cool even in the heat of summer, the one with the babysitters who took care of your child while they pampered you in steam and lavender.
Maureen was outside the gates of the Estates, turning onto the road that skirted through the meadows, when she realized she had forgotten her cell phone. It was too late to go back home, if she did so she might cancel her expedition altogether, so she directed her car to the first gas station and a public phone and called directory assistance, and reached a half-awake clerk at the spa-hotel and made a reservation. Minutes later, mother and daughter were on the unencumbered, early morning highway, heading out of the city, sprinting eastward in the face of an incoming bumper-to-bumper, heading toward the dry foothills at the edge of the metropolis.
Inside the game room, beneath the flat-screen and the game console, Scott Torres awoke on the floor at 5:35 a.m. after a night of surprisingly uninterrupted sleep, six hours in which the memory of what had happened in the living room disappeared in the inky cube of a lightless room and he lived in blissful nothingness. Within three seconds of opening his eyes, the series of events of the night before replayed themselves in his memory with the stark simp
licity of those PowerPoint presentations the executives concocted on the fourth floor at Elysian Systems. He remembered the staccato dialogue of exchanged insults, each slightly more crude than the next, and then his attempt to get away while Maureen followed him around the room, yelling at the back of his shoulders. That’s what happens when you call a woman that word you should never use: they either sulk away or come at you with newfound ferocity. She had counterattacked with a spiteful commentary about Scott’s being unable to see a horizon beyond “the stupid stucco coffin” in which his mother, separated from his father, had lived her final days alone; it was a remark so stunningly cold that it had caused the argument to stop while Scott took in the realization that he had married a woman who could insult the dead. His thoughts had turned to the many ways he might impose his will with his hands at precisely the moment Maureen took a step toward him to renew the argument: he pushed her away with the full, furious strength a man in his early forties could muster, a half-defensive shove that had sent her sprawling backward into the coffee table.
For an instant before she lost her balance he felt a strange and childlike gratification. At last! When she hit the table—such a fragile construction, that piece of Mexican craftwork—and Araceli entered the room, it all disappeared. Now a hollow numbness occupied the space between his eyes. Maureen had violated a trust by spending that money, she had damaged their family, but of course he had lost the moral high ground when he pushed her. Would she ever forgive him for her fall, see the full picture of events, and apologize for what she had done and said? There is a less than fifty percent probability. Or would she believe that her fall and the broken table had absolved her of any need to acknowledge how vicious she had been? The much more likely outcome. If she’d managed to get a full night’s sleep she might feel something other than the outraged sense of victimhood of the night before, when he feared, for a moment, that she would call the police. By the feminist calculus that followed these events, he was an abuser, a male inflictor of bodily harm, and therefore would be permanently expelled from the garden of family love, into the purgatory inhabited by the alcoholics, the goons, and the serial adulterers. Perhaps, after the erasures a few hours of sleep could bring, Maureen would see the crash and fall for what they really were: an accident, an act of mutual stupidity and clumsiness, like a pratfall in a comedy skit. This is what happens, he would tell her, when two middle-aged people push their sleep-deprived bodies to raise small children, a task we should leave for twentysomething decath-letes, ballerinas, and other spry and limber people.
Scott would tell her these things in due time, but after just a few minutes awake, he had decided that for the moment a full retreat was in order, an escape from his wife’s sense of entitlement, from her new fascination with rare desert fauna, which appeared to have replaced earlier fascinations with rustic Italian furniture and abstract California art. Let her figure it out on her own: or rather, with Araceli, who did the bulk of the work, who kept the house livable and the children fed and gave Maureen time to dream up schemes that would empty their bank accounts—now, as many times before, he thought of Araceli as a kind of subtraction from his wife. In Maine’s “Down East,” where his mother was from, and in the unknown Mexican places his father had lived, they understood about respect and responsibility. He was still the son of scrappers and survivors.
I have to get the hell out of here. It was what he told himself those last days at MindWare, when he longed to work with adults again. Living with Maureen was looking like the final act at his roller-coaster start-up, when the Big Man spent an extravagance on five-star hotels, dinners at restaurants on the Strip, and a thousand dollars in golf lessons in a quixotic campaign to seduce the venture capitalists, raise cash, and fend off the board. At some point you had to say, Stop, it’s over. Suddenly, those old sayings of his Mexican father didn’t sound so silly and quaint: Live cheap and smell sweet. Never hang your hat where you can’t reach it. After grabbing a few clothes, he was out the door and in his car, gliding down toward the ocean with only the red eye of Scorpio watching him.
Such was the domestic discipline in the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that several hours passed before either Araceli or the two boys noticed that Maureen and Scott were gone. Having been conditioned by a half summer’s worth of their mother’s anti-television, anti-computer exhortations, Brandon and Keenan began their day with appropriately mind-nurturing and solitary activities. It was a quiet, sisterless morning, and through the open summer windows and the screens the house filled with the squeaky chee-deep chee-deep of the tree swallows that were acquainting themselves with the ocotillo in the backyard. Saman-tha’s usual prespeech utterances and screams were not there to ring in the ears of her brothers, though the boys were not yet conscious of her absence. The boys did not know that their sister was already halfway to the Sonoran Desert with their mother just as they were finishing their Cream of Wheat with Araceli. Keenan drifted over to the Room of a Thousand Wonders and began assembling a three-level spacecraft with Danish plastic mini-bricks, while Brandon climbed onto the couch in the living room and lost himself in the fourth volume of a detective-fantasy thriller for “middle readers” that involved teams of elves capable of time-bending magic. So gripping was the escape of the boy-detective protagonist from yet another band of machine-gun-toting criminals, that Brandon failed to notice that the coffee table was missing.
After the usual and easy post-breakfast cleanup in the kitchen, Araceli wandered about the house picking up dirty laundry, starting with the pajamas in the boys’ room, and then moving to the nursery. She was preoccupied, once again, with Felipe, because after putting away the saucepan she had used to prepare the Cream of Wheat, she had a sudden premonition that he would call her today—perhaps it was some sort of psychic displacement produced by having witnessed the fight between Scott and Maureen the night before. In the presence of violent disagreement, a germ of happiness might take root. Hoy el gordito me va a llamar. Araceli was daydream-dancing with her “little fat man” when she entered the nursery and noticed the comforter on the floor and quickly surmised that Maureen had slept there. A few minutes later the conclusion was confirmed when Araceli entered the master bedroom and found the bed exactly as she had left it yesterday afternoon. Clearly, el señor Scott had not slept here either; he had probably bedded down with the big television set, and indeed, on her final stop on the laundry search Araceli found a sleeping bag and pillow tossed on the floor there. Well, of course they didn’t make up before going to bed, that was no surprise. Araceli made her way to the laundry room, got the first load of Maureen’s clothes into the washer after checking for and failing to see any blood: It appears they did not kill themselves. Finally, she circled back to the kitchen, unsurprised that in her wanderings through the house her path did not cross with that of la señora Maureen. It was a big house and on many days Maureen wandered in and out, unannounced, quite often.
At 12:15 p.m. the boys came back to the kitchen table for lunch, and it was only after they had devoured the last of the chicken tenders Araceli had prepared that Keenan, who was always slightly more attuned to any change in his surroundings than his older brother, finally asked Araceli casually, “Where’s my mom?”
Araceli turned from the sink, where she had a saucepan soaking in lightly soaped water, and faced Keenan.
“¿No está en la casa?”
“No, she’s not here.”
“That is strange,” Araceli said. It occurred to Araceli, for a second, that she should utter something to disimular, one of those verbal misdirections that Mexicans are especially good at, a fiction such as, Oh, now I remember, she went to the market, that would lift the look of mild concern that had suddenly affixed itself to Keenan’s hazel eyes. Instead she said nothing and thought how on any other day Maureen exiting the house unannounced without the two boys for an hour or two or three wouldn’t cause her any concern, but after the events of the night before …? Given the swirling cloud of disorder and em
otional collapse gathering around this household, anything was possible. One day a crew of men hacking the garden with machetes, the next her patrones wrestling in the living room. What next? Maybe my crazy jefa left the baby with me too and didn’t tell me. In the time it took to scrub the saucepan the idea morphed from preposterous to credible. The baby is wandering somewhere alone in the house! I have to find the baby! Araceli bolted from the kitchen, her hands dripping with dishwater, leaving Keenan’s unanswered “What’s wrong?” in her wake as she moved in big, loping strides to the living room, and to the nursery and through the hallways, into the walk-in closet, calling out, “Samanta! Samanta!” eating the “th” in much the same way the baby herself would in six months’ time when she tried, for the first time, to pronounce her own name. Finally, Araceli sprinted out of the house and into the backyard, across the lawn, and toward the cool, still blue plane of the swimming pool. No, please, no, not here, aquí no, in the name of Nuestra Señora Purísima, no. The baby was not in the pool, nor in the desert garden, nor anywhere else within the confines of 107 Paseo Linda Bonita, because Maureen had taken the baby with her, of course. Araceli could see that the baby was with la señora Maureen. There was no need to panic.